When the United States Spoke French

May 19, 2014
The French contributed more to the formation of the United States than sending the marquis de Lafayette and some troops during the Revolution. In the 1790s, the new nation’s capital, Philadelphia, attracted Frenchmen staunchly dedicated to republican principles, and historian Furstenberg (In the Name of the Father) focuses on five of those eminent émigrés: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord; Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry; François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld, duc de Liancourt; Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney; and Louis-Marie, vicomte de Noailles. These refugees regarded America—and Philadelphia in particular—both as a sympathetic ideological haven and a source of new economic opportunities for strengthening France’s empire. Furstenburg begins with a lush social and cultural history of French influences in Philadelphia. The men settled in the same upscale neighborhood and proceeded to shape the city’s tastes and fashions by importing French goods. Armed with letters of introduction, they forged personal and professional relationships with powerful Americans, keeping them in the best circles. The book’s second half explores political intrigue, highlighting the transnational competition for control of the vast western territory of the North American continent. The Americans ultimately won that contest, and thanks to Furstenberg’s riveting history, we now have a better idea why. Illus.

June 1, 2014
Furstenberg (History/Johns Hopkins Univ.; In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation, 2007) expands the historical outlook of the 18th century's great upheavals and shows the global effects of the Enlightenment.The author studies five former members of the French Assemblee Constituante who became refugees in Philadelphia: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Le Rochefoucauld, the duc de Liancourt; Louis-Marie Vicomte de Noailles; Moreau de Saint-Mery; and Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Comte Volney. All of them helped rewrite the French constitution, a document with which the authors hoped to achieve the same results as the American Revolution. However, it was not to be, and the fallout from the French explosion was felt across the Atlantic. All five of the men were liberals, almost all aristocrats, and they were leaders with contacts in all the best houses and banks of Europe. Those connections helped save post-Revolutionary America, allowing the building of markets, forging of marriages and the funding of the Louisiana Purchase. These Frenchmen attached themselves to the best minds in America, implemented land purchases and found investors abroad, providing desperately needed credit to the new nation. In Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti, the world's wealthiest colony and gateway to the Gulf of Mexico, the late-1800s slave revolts proved to be as world changing as events in France and the United States. The island was France's steppingstone to re-establish a colony in the Mississippi Valley and control its vast natural resources. Furstenberg follows all five men throughout their time in the United States. Though they were here to escape and to advance their personal fortunes, along the way, they helped the young country survive. "[A]lthough the emigres did not make this new world," writes the author, "their lives poke through the accumulated detritus that makes up the historical archive with greater clarity and sharpness than most."A bright, absorbing account of a short period in history that still resounds today.

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July 1, 2014
Layered with business, politics, and salon society, Furstenberg's portrait of Philadelphia in the 1790s, when the city was the seat of the new federal government, offers intriguing new perspectives on the history of the early republic. The government's chief problem, in addition to establishing itself, was avoiding entanglement in the war between Britain and France. The latter's convulsions exiled five then-prominent revolutionary figures to Philadelphia, whose activities in America form the foundation of Furstenberg's narrative. The group represented the elite of an influx of thousands of French to Philadelphia; the capital became bilingual. The immigrants animated Francophilia, at least initially, among their American hosts, a feeling that Furstenberg depicts in the sociability of dinners and letters. The scene was subtly susceptible, however, to transatlantic political tremors. Depicting the sensitivity of Philadelphia society to the political events of the period, Furstenberg achieves a truly original interpretation of how the U.S. weathered the fraught decade to become, with the Louisiana Purchase, a continental rather than merely a coastal country. A fine combination of social and political history, Furstenberg's well-written work will fascinate American-history buffs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)